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A review by isabellarobinson7
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Władysław Szpilman
5.0
Rating: 5 stars
So I committed the ultimate book-lover sin: I watched the movie before I read the book. I know, I know, I should be birched publicly before the Hall like a disgraced Aes Sedai. But in my defence... no, I have no defence. I knew it was a book, I had access to said book, and I still watched the movie first.
But let me cut straight to the chase: this book was incredible. Brilliant. Stunning. Shocking. Mesmerising. All the other positive adjectives you can find in the thesaurus (that I can't be bothered looking up right now). It truly raised the bar for what a memoir can be for me. There is little I would change about this book. I would even go as far as saying there is nothing I would change about this book. And there are very few pieces of media for which I can say that.
Despite being someone's memoir, The Pianist never felt boring to me. It was so gripping (not in a fake way, like the events were dramatised for entertainment). I never got bored. This maybe due to the fact that Szpilman wrote it in 1946, so it was recorded after everything, and it doesn’t draw from rambling diaries he made during the war (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just can get a bit... dry. I'm looking at you Anne Frank). But Szpilman was writing from memory, so therefore the only things that stuck in his mind were the most important things. There was no excess blabbering and it made it so much more enjoyable. And he had a lot of ground to cover - he spent six years in Nazi occupied Poland as a Jew, so you can expect quite a lot happened. Yet, he managed to keep it down to 200ish pages by trimming all the excess, and it still never felt lacking in information.
Crap, I'm just rambling at this point. I've had to cut out so many paragraphs of nonsense, because everything about this book was great. Man, I could quote the whole book here. Even though Szpilman's son prefaces the book by saying his father was a musician and not a writer, there were some beautiful quotes. I'm not sure if it's just the translation, or maybe even the translator, but the writing was really good.
But yeah. Need to end it here. I can say with a fair amount of confidence that The Pianist is one of, if not the, best non-fiction book I have ever read. I can't stop thinking about it.
So I committed the ultimate book-lover sin: I watched the movie before I read the book. I know, I know, I should be birched publicly before the Hall like a disgraced Aes Sedai. But in my defence... no, I have no defence. I knew it was a book, I had access to said book, and I still watched the movie first.
But let me cut straight to the chase: this book was incredible. Brilliant. Stunning. Shocking. Mesmerising. All the other positive adjectives you can find in the thesaurus (that I can't be bothered looking up right now). It truly raised the bar for what a memoir can be for me. There is little I would change about this book. I would even go as far as saying there is nothing I would change about this book. And there are very few pieces of media for which I can say that.
Despite being someone's memoir, The Pianist never felt boring to me. It was so gripping (not in a fake way, like the events were dramatised for entertainment). I never got bored. This maybe due to the fact that Szpilman wrote it in 1946, so it was recorded after everything, and it doesn’t draw from rambling diaries he made during the war (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just can get a bit... dry. I'm looking at you Anne Frank). But Szpilman was writing from memory, so therefore the only things that stuck in his mind were the most important things. There was no excess blabbering and it made it so much more enjoyable. And he had a lot of ground to cover - he spent six years in Nazi occupied Poland as a Jew, so you can expect quite a lot happened. Yet, he managed to keep it down to 200ish pages by trimming all the excess, and it still never felt lacking in information.
Crap, I'm just rambling at this point. I've had to cut out so many paragraphs of nonsense, because everything about this book was great. Man, I could quote the whole book here. Even though Szpilman's son prefaces the book by saying his father was a musician and not a writer, there were some beautiful quotes. I'm not sure if it's just the translation, or maybe even the translator, but the writing was really good.
But yeah. Need to end it here. I can say with a fair amount of confidence that The Pianist is one of, if not the, best non-fiction book I have ever read. I can't stop thinking about it.